Rake is something I have been using since day one with Rails, but that I really haven’t gone any deeper with than the basic rails rake tasks. Today I had to write a rake tasks that ran some checks and updated records.

Here’s what I learned:

1. This article by Jason Seifer was a great introduction to rake. The big idea is that rake has namespaces and inside those namespaces you define tasks.

    namespace :feed do
      desc "Feed dog" 
      task :dog => :environment do
        puts "fed the dog"
      end
   
      desc "Feed cat"
      task :cat => :environment do 
        puts "fed the cat"
      end
   
      desc "Feed dog and cat"
      task :all => [:dog, :cat]
    end
   

2. Rake tasks should be tested. Thoughtbot provides a really nice shared context that makes testing very easy.